The main issue I've got is that you have to use a taskfile. So if you want to have each task as a single frame you need to write out one line for one frame so you'd need to make a 300 line file for a 300. Is there a way to tell it to increment frames without the tasklist?

No, it's not possible. Backburner is unable to tell what is a multiframe job from a command line submission without that tasklist file. It would be better to group the frames though, rather than have 1 frame per line (example: 1-10, 11-20, etc.).

FYI, if you run Backburner on a single computer, you don't need the tasklist arguments, because obviously, your single computer is going to render all the frames anyway.

Okay good to know. I'll just have to write some kind of app to write the taskfile then...and actually create the bat file while I'm at it. I prefer to have each frame a separate task. Easier to keep track of in the queue.

Do I have the output correct? The way it outputs right now would be nettest.1.bmp. Is there a way to get it nettest.0001.bmp?

The "%%tp2" part refers to the second column of the tasklist file, if I remember correctly, so if you are calling that bit of information into your file name, then it might be best to add the number padding into your tasklist file. So instead of "1", your app could write "0001" in that column. Though I don't know if Backburner will read that padded number properly, but I don't see why it wouldn't.

What would be totally awesome is if we had the ability to write own plugins using tcl or python and load them directly into Terragen2 itself as nodes. That way, We wouldn't have to write external programs to submit via command lines. That would enable us to dynamically have things like the job name and frame range parsed automatically for submission to a network renderer. Nuke pulls this off perfectly, as it's so easy for relatively non-technical people to write their own gizmos in tcl or python.

Oh yeah it would be great to write a script to submit to backburner through Terragen. People always seem to be asking about a network manager. Since Backburner 2007 can be downloaded for free maybe it could be terragen's unofficial network manager.

I'm fairly certain this installs the whole thing and not just a patch like the name implies. I'm sure it's meant for just 3ds max users to download, but there's nothing stoping anyone from downloading it.

Parts in red are things you need to set up, like filename and location, but I also needed to specify the frame range, so -tp_start:600 is telling backburner to start at this frame number and -numtasks:291 is saying render 291 frames from 600, so last frame is 890.

What really threw me was the timeout switch. Backburner defaults to 60mins, so if you have a long render, it will cut out after an hour and re-assign a new task number to that machine and you will never get a frame rendered.

I'm not sure what -hide does in this context, it would be nice to see a frame being rendered, but don't think this has anything to do with that.

Seeing the number of views to this thread, it seems that a few people have tried or trying this, and hopefully some of the above may help.